Emergency! Photo Tour

As a 10-year-old kid, watching each new episode of Emergency! on Saturday
night was a matter of life or death. What made Emergency! so compelling is
that it showed real-world type of activities of the firefighters and medical
staff, using real fire equipment and a real hospital. The show came along
at the very start of the Paramedic program in Los Angeles and helped to
revolutionize emergency medical care across the country. For example, CPR,
which has saved countless people, was popularized by the show. In this photo
tour, we visit some of the filming locations and equipment used on the show
some 40 years after its premier on national TV.

The fire station featured in Emergency! is Station 51 of the Los Angeles
County Fire Department. The number 51 was selected because LACoFD did not
have a Station 51 at that time. The actual station that was used is Station
127 located at 2049 East 223rd Street in Carson, California, which is near
Long Beach. LACoFD has several stations that use this same floor plan, but
Station 127 was ideal for filming since it faced south.

Station 127 looks very much like it did in the 1970s. The parking area in
the foreground was added in the 1990s, and the gate leading to the back
parking lot was added in the 2000s. The station now honors Robert Cinader,
the producer of both Emergency! and Adam-12. The lettering was modified
around 2005 to conform to a new standard developed by the LACoFD. The
lettering is higher on the wall in the show.

Squad 51 is owned and displayed by the Los Angeles County Fire Museum,
located at 9834 Flora Vista Street in Bellflower, California. The museum
is open one weekend per month and does not charge admission. Note that
this is the County of Los Angeles, not the City of Los Angeles, which
explains why the station and museum are not located within the city limits
of Los Angeles. The squad was donated to LACoFD after the show ended, who
occasionally used the squad when they were short of equipment. The squad was
transferred to the museum when it was retired.

The squad is a 1974 Dodge dually truck with a utility box on the back. It
was built by the studio using blueprints supplied by the LACoFD. It was
built exactly to the blueprints, including a white light on top of the
lightbar that was in the drawings, but was never installed on any of the
LACoFD vehicles. There were two other squads used in the series, but history
has lost track of what happened to them.

The fire engine used in the first two seasons was Engine 60, a 1965 model
Crown Firecoach. It was an actual LACoFD fire truck stationed at
Universal Studios. It was one of the last open cab trucks in use by the
LACoFD. It is now retired and displayed at the LA County Fire Museum.
The Crown had a twin, Engine 127, which was housed at Station 127, and
was used for some location shots. That engine was rebuilt with a closed
cab. It was heavily damaged in an accident and scrapped.

Station 51 received a new engine early in its third season. Ward La France
had done a large deal with the LACoFD, and they decided to donate a fire
truck to Universal Studios for the show. The Ward served Station 51 for
the rest of the TV series and appeared in one of the Emergency! movies
after the series ended. The engine then went to Yosemite National Park,
where it was Engine 7. The museum traded a restored 1937 Seagrave fire
truck to obtain title to the Ward. While the truck is in good shape, the
museum hopes to restore it back to its 1970s appearance.

This is the view across the street from Station 127. This is the site of
the Atlantic Richfield refinery that served as a backdrop for many of
the exciting rescues in the show. The refinery was purchased by BP and
was retired from service. The site is now cleaned up and is for sale.
Station 127 is in an area that has several large chemical companies including
two active refineries. This has been an issue for the station over the years,
such as when a chlorine leak damaged the station, trucks, and could have
been fatal if the firefighters had not been out in front of the building and
saw the cloud moving towards the station.

The hospital featured in the series is named Rampart General Hospital,
sometimes referred to as Rampart Emergency Hospital. In real life, it was
Harbor General Hospital, located at the corner of Carson Street and Vermont
Avenue in Carson, California. The exterior looks much the same as it did
during the series, though the lower wing on the north side of the building has
been completely rebuilt. A major expansion project was underway when I
visited early in 2011.

Today, Rampart is known as Harbor-UCLA Medical Center. It is affiliated with
the UCLA College of Medicine. The grounds were developed during WWII as the
Los Angeles Port of Embarkation Hospital, where casualties from the war in the
Pacific would arrive. Despite this being a county facility, the hospital is
located within the city limits of Los Angeles on a thin strip of land that
connects the downtown and harbor areas. The name Rampart was suggested by
Cinader based on his work on Adam-12, where Rampart was a division within the
Los Angeles Police Department. Harbor Medical Center was part of the original
Paramedic program, with its first Paramedic class graduating in 1970.

One episode of Emergency! has Station 51 responding to a fire in a lab
building at Rampart. The building shown was a low one-story wood building.
There are a series of such buildings on the property that date back to the
World War II era. These buildings house a variety of labs as well as
a number of county agencies.